Chapter Fifteen Fenlia #2
‘All the cells are reproducing at a faster rate,’ she murmurs.
She does not know all the words in Lunae, so she keeps to Soleben as she explains.
‘These…’ Her fingers trail over the stains.
‘It’s excess blood and bruising. The veins are literally bursting from too much blood, but then healing over too quickly for them to bleed out.
Their veins are getting harder. Stronger.
But that is putting pressure on their organs, which are working faster than they should be.
It’s like…their metabolism has gone into overdrive.
All of that should be killing them, it’s why they feel like death, but… but instead there’s…’
‘Too much life,’ Elician whispers, keeping to Cat’s native tongue rather than his own. ‘Like Life himself has been let loose.’
‘Those pendants, could they have…lingering effects?’ Lio asks suddenly. Heads snap up in all directions. ‘Tricked their bodies into constantly living?’
Elician nods absently but does not make a move to approach any of the individuals spread out in heaps before him.
He wants to save them, that much is evident, but the longer he stands still, the longer Fen wonders if his decision to help nearly forty thousand people back from the dead has left a greater mark on him than they realized.
But eventually, he turns back towards Cat, whispering something to him that Fen cannot hear.
It is too quiet, and clearly not meant for her ears anyway.
She doesn’t try to listen in. Squinting from face to face, Fen makes a personal assessment of the prisoners based on what she can pick up just from observation.
Some are clearly worse off than others. But it is the root of their ailment that bothers her the most. If every part of their bodies is working as efficiently as possible, how can they be dying?
At best guess, from everything she’s learned about her powers, they have tapped into a wellspring of Life himself, receiving a command to live live live.
But that command is coming out twisted. Wrong.
Fen fidgets as she stands, impatience pushing her to do something. Cat’s lips keep drawing in tighter and tighter. He is not responding to whatever Elician is telling him, but he does not like what he is hearing. Then, Elician turns, calling her name.
‘Brother?’
‘We need your help,’ Cat responds, casting a wary eye over the assembled group.
‘I can heal multiple people at once,’ Elician says calmly in Soleben.
‘But you cannot. So, Cat is going to stop the processes that are overworking in their bodies. He is going to kill those at their source. I will…reach out to them all with my own power, and you should be able to feel them through me.’ He wiggles his fingers at her.
‘I want you to focus on healing any excess damage that happens to them in the process. I should be able to amplify what you are putting out – and the methodology you are using to affect them all in turn. The point here is to end the overproduction, and then restart that which keeps their balance intact.’
‘Why do you even need me? Why can’t you heal them on your own if you’re already connecting to them all?’
‘Because the problem is their connection to Life and Death,’ Cat replies.
‘Cells die every day. Blood is replaced, chemicals and hormones are processed through the liver and spleen. Every single safeguard that would ensure the death of something is failing, and the result is this: too many things working as efficiently as they ever have. Flooded with life but absent of the death it requires. Elician…and all Givers heal by encouraging things to live, but these soldiers don’t need more life.
They need some death. I need to kill everything that is wrong in their bodies, but once I do…
those faults need to be healed correctly.
And you know how to work with death. You excel at fixing that which is already dead.
Elician will connect you to all of them at once, but you will be… ’
‘Healing them through you?’ she asks, turning to her brother. ‘Have you ever done this before?’
‘No,’ Elician replies. ‘But I know how it feels to have another one of our kind working on the same person at once. I have an idea of what it would mean if we did this together.’ Fen wishes he hadn’t said that.
The guards at the door are still so close, and it’s as much as confirming what everyone already suspected: he’s known for a while that he is a Giver.
He does not care. He holds out his palm.
‘Take it; you’ll feel my presence when we connect.
At the very least, I will try to follow your lead.
It seems like it’s your turn to teach me something new, sister. ’
Cat waits until she nods her assent, then he takes one step closer to his people.
They flinch at the gesture. ‘A Giver cannot heal you,’ Cat says carefully in Lunae.
‘You have too much life and…it’s out of balance with the death within you.
I don’t need to touch you, but I can heal you, if you will let me. You are my people, and I—’
‘You’re a Reaper!’
Cat flinches. The voice is the strongest out of the crowd yet, but even so it ends in coughs filled with disdain and hatred.
The voices get louder, surer of themselves even as they strain around their despair.
‘We’d rather die than let you near us!’ someone says.
The one closest reiterates that point by asserting they would rather die than let him be their king too.
One after another they each say their piece, hateful and cruel, shouts of protest straining from the lungs of those who can barely inhale from the constricting pressure of too-strong veins and too-thick muscular walls.
With bruises spreading in deep black stains showing just how brittle their bodies are even though they keep trying to repair themselves faster and faster.
Cat’s breath catches in his throat. Fen bites her lip, struggling to keep from telling them all to do just that: die and stay dead.
Marina has been silent since she entered the room, but now she touches the small of Cat’s back in support.
He leans into the touch as he closes his eyes and gives the assembled prisoners of war a slight nod.
‘I’m your king,’ Cat says. ‘I don’t need your permission to save your lives.’ He holds out his hand. Elician takes it, then reaches for Fen. Her fingers wrap around his.
All her senses come alive.
It is nothing at all like healing the Reapers, nor is it like the work she did with Elena Morsen, studying the changing metamorphosis of cellular structures in the body and how they react to different stimuli.
She understood the basics of her craft, but she could never find the source of an ailment unless she physically touched someone.
Her skin was what enabled her to focus. For Elician, he needs only to exist, as if the air itself contains the information he needs to diagnose and treat.
That same air now turns tight and concentrated, electrified as a spark of something seems to travel through Cat and Elician into her.
She can smell ozone in the air. Water. Rain.
She can feel a chill start to settle around her.
Panicked voices rise up, and Cat stands stalwart before them.
One of the prisoners tries to charge forward, leaping towards Cat as if they could physically stop what he intends to do.
Lio uses his sheathed blade to throw the man back.
He takes his place in front of Elician and Fen, perfectly prepared to restrain anyone else should they try as well.
Cat holds out his hand. Voices break amongst the crowd.
Shattered wails rise up. Fen’s skin prickles and twitches as electricity sparks along her vascular system.
Elician’s energy dips and rises, and just as she starts to wonder how she could possibly heal whatever it is that is going wrong, she sees it: death in need of changing.
Cat is not killing these prisoners. He is stopping the signals in their bodies that are ruthlessly insisting on making more again and again.
More cells, more life out of control. And as he stops those signals, Fen heals just like she did when she healed the scars on those Reapers’ faces.
She gasps for a moment, recentres herself, and works on smoothing out Death’s jagged edges, gently binding each vein, organ and fibre into the webbing of their normality.
She finds that which is wrong and then eases each ailment back into a homeostasis of right.
The bruising on the soldiers’ bodies starts to fade. Their breathing grows lighter. Their organs become less engorged, and finally – a balance.
It’s just as Elician said before: she needs only to think about healing one person and he can cast her thoughts to them all.
She can feel it, the way the room sighs in relief as the wills of Life and Death rebalance within the bodies of people who do not deserve this second, third, fourth chance at living.
Each body pieces itself back together again the way it was meant to be.
Cat drops his hand. Elician lets her go. She does not even feel tired.
‘We were ready to die for our country!’ someone shouts, blaming Cat for their ability to shout at all.
Cat meets their eyes. ‘And I’m asking you to live for it.’
There is nothing else that truly needs to be said, so he leaves them to their grief and Fen watches him go.
Elician murmurs, ‘Well done,’ as he passes her by, following after Cat.
For the second time today, Fen has healed Alelunens who came to her homeland to slaughter her people.
For the second time, she has been praised for it.
The captive soldiers in the room sit horrified in their now-perfect bodies.
‘Stello Alest is a better man than all of you,’ she tells them. ‘And you’ll all be going back to Alelune because of him.’
‘He’s a Reaper!’
‘Yes. And he saved your life. When’s the last time you could say that about any of your monarchs before him?’ She does not care to hear the answer. She leaves and lets the door close and lock behind her.
Cat, Elician and Lio have not got far; they are just outside the school’s main door.
‘What do you think that was?’ she asks as she draws near.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it before.
’ But they don’t answer her. Their attention is on a child across the street, scratching at a black pustule that is peeking out along the edge of their collar.
The child sneezes, and the breath is torn from Fen’s lungs.
‘It’s not just about the pendants?’ she asks. ‘It’s contagious?’
And another person coughs down the road.
‘Lio…I think you should close those gates again,’ Elician says.
It seems their good luck has ended.